Way to douse my own thread!
No Mickle. It was your Cyclorama classification, which CCer is heartless enough to tell someone to mess with 16 categories and 54 subcategories in existence?
Just for the sake of playing devil's advocate, I googled "street bike", and found most of the references on the first page relating to motorcycles, followed by purveyors of motorbikes/bicycles using street address in their name... Of course we are all free to advocating a new or resurrecting an old label to replace 'hybrid', or swim against a tide, but the heart of the issue is perhaps not the label.
It seems to me the main criticisms of the hybrid label are:
1) It is too vague/broad
2) The term is meaningless (e.g. because most bikes are hybrids of something else)
3) There is no such thing
I don't really understand 3) because as raindog said we must be talking about nothing otherwise. 2) is technically true but in practice I suspect most of us believe it meant a flat-ish bar thing with mixed road/mtb components/features. As Mickle's useful historic review seems to indicate, road and mtb were main market categories, so the birth of the genre if not the name was probably inevitable, and they did represent progress since many were riding mtbs mainly on roads. While hybrids might not be the best of both worlds, they can be a useful compromise to many.
If you are still following me then perhaps 1) is effectively saying hybrid's success is resulting in its current curse - this "new" category is now covering too many too broadly, just like bicycle is too broad a label if none other exists. I don't think I can argue with that.
To examine this "too vague/broad" issue, Mickle when you said "I
f I was starting from scratch again I might do it differently based on a set of parameters rather than 'types of bike'.", what did you have in mind?
